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Monday, November 28, 2011

With Blue and Cream off to be quilted I took advantage of the long holiday weekend to start on a new project. Black, White and Brights is starting out great. I saw this tutorial on YouTube from the Missouri Star Quilt Company site (Love MSQC tuts!!!). The pattern is X's and O's or Hugs and Kisses. I haven't been able to find a pattern on-line other than this tutorial so you'll have to wait for the finished project to see the whole thing.

Now that I have a pattern in mind, which by the way, took me about 2 months to decide on, I start doing color auditions. .Here's how I generally start out with color auditions. First I decide which fabric is the central character, in this case I'm trying to decide if I can work in two different prints that have similar colors.

Running shoes and

Bras!

I pin them on the design wall then rifle through my stash to pull out coordinating colors/prints. Some of these I purchased at the same time as the prints so I knew they coordinated and I knew where to find them among the stash.

Since I'm using my stash there is always the possibility I'll find the perfect color only to find out it's less than a fat quarter which makes me kind of nutty. Why didn't I buy a whole bunch of it when I was shopping? This is where I start to get creative. I pulled more pieces of the same color selections and try them out on the sewing table.

This is supposed to be a "scrappy" quilt. Back when people were making quilts out of necessity they often used bits and pieces of fabric from scraps of old clothes or other sewing projects. I've never been particularly fond of these types of quilts and prefer to have "organized" scrappy quilts. Fortunately, I'm not living out of a Conestoga wagon or a sod house on the open prairie or waiting for a ship to arrive from Europe with a bolt of fabric. If I don't find what I'm looking for in my medium size stash of fabrics here at home I can just run down to the local quilt shop or nearest Joanne's to get what I need.

Before I sew anything I give the pattern a try out with the colors I've chosen like this:

And that's where I left off at the end of the day yesterday. So tonight I might actually get something sewn together! Stay tuned, there will be more coming up this week.

Friday, November 11, 2011

I haven't mentioned it before but one of the up sides to giving quilts as gifts is getting snail-mail. I love hearing about and seeing the quilts in action!

Betty sent a thank you note the other day in which she reports she's using her quilt and "it's been comfy cozy".

I also received a very nice thank you note from Trevor's mom (a.k.a. Amanda) with this cute picture of Trevor and his quilt. Just adorable!

In this day and age of technology, where e-mail notes are a perfectly acceptable form of thanking someone, it's nice to know that the hand written thank you note is still alive and well among my family and friends.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

With schedules being what they are we haven't had a chance to get all The Girls together so I couldn't deliver the quilts I made for Betty and Audrey. Last Friday we thought we had a quorum so I brought the quilts to Jean's to surprise the birthday girls. As luck would have it Audrey had to cancel at the last minute but Betty was there so she received her VERY belated birthday quilt.﻿

"It smells so good!"

Jeannie's behind the quilt holding it up so Betty can get a better look.﻿﻿ ﻿

Oh look! A tent! Some beers! OSJ!

Here's a close up of what's she's looking at. For those of you readers that are quilters the pattern is Disappearing 9-Patch. ﻿The fabrics are cats, cookies, camping and beer, 4 of Betty's favorite things.

The quilting is dragon flies buzzing all over the quilt. It's done in an orange colored thread which really pops on the black borders as well as the cream background fabric. A big thank you to Lorri Wurtzler of Nashua for doing the long-arm quilting. She really brought my idea for "some kind of bugs" to life!

The binding is a black and gold print that made a pretty pattern when folded and sewn into place.

It was so fun finishing this quilt with all those dragon flies buzzing around!

Finished binding

﻿﻿﻿﻿Now back to the birthday girl. ﻿﻿Betty always makes chocolate chip cookies for The Girls when we get together. She has the fun container that has a big cookie for a lid! Sure enough when she arrived she had a container full of warm "chippers" for us.﻿.

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Who is Gladrox?

I can thank my oldest brother George for that. He had a nick name for everyone. One day, when I was about 6 years old, he saw me playing dress up. I was all decked out in one of my mom's "fancy" dresses, high heels, and all the sparkling jewelry I could get my hands on. he said I could be one of the characters in the Richie Rich comics. That's when he christened me "Mrs. Gladrox". It was a long time ago but some of my closest family members still call me Gladrox!

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The content of this website is the sole property of Deborah Michel. All personal photos, graphic images, and words are copyrighted 2017 by Deborah Michel and are not for commercial use. Feel free to link to this blog, but please respect my hard work by not copying or republish any my posts, in part or whole without my permission. You may borrow one photo of a finished project only, to go with your link to my blog. Please be sure to credit the photo to me, Debby Michel at Gladroxquilts.blogspot.com and always provide a link back along with the credit. Thank you!